Category Archives: Green Ideas

Two year birthday

Back at the beginning of the month (June 2nd, to be precise), HerGreenLife turned two.  (It totally slipped my mind, which I guess makes me a bad blog mama.)

Fittingly, this has been the best month ever in terms of blog readership — it’s always fun to see the numbers go up!

I look forward to continuing the main themes of the blog (green transportation, growing and preparing local food, and general green and health-related musings) into the coming year, while integrating the transition from a family of two to a family of three.

If you have any requests, questions, or topics you would like to see covered here, please let me know.

Thanks for reading and sharing the journey thus far 🙂  Here’s to another great year to come!

Ungreening Green Drinks

It had been a few months since we made it to a St. Louis Green Drinks event, so last night’s gathering was a priority.  They had a great panel of speakers on the topic of Urban Farming — apparently quite popular, because it was standing room only.

The usual meeting location, Schlafly Bottleworks, is easily bikeable for us, but last night our trusty steeds did not grace the bike racks.  Although I’ve been feeling pretty good for the past week, I have had a few relapses into not so good, and I’m beginning to wonder if it’s as much my body giving signals that I’ve been overdoing things as it is related to what I’m eating.  So I’m trying to be good and take it easy, at least until Friday.

Despite having some justification for riding in a car to get there, I felt a bit guilty all night, especially given the nature of the event (but hey, at least the topic wasn’t green transportation).

Not all was lost, as I had some great discussions after the panel, including the chance to bring up Cycling Savvy.  Speaking of, if you live in the St. Louis area, don’t miss the July series of Cycling Savvy courses.  I won’t be teaching, but depending on baby’s arrival, Matthew will be teaching both of the on-bike course segments (“Train Your Bike” and “Tour of St. Louis”).

Biking with Baby — Part II

I’ve been mulling this over for a few months now, and you can read my first post on the subject here.  Unfortunately, I don’t have any hard and fast plans — more reading and research = more confusion!

Bicycle as Transportation
In reading comments on some other “biking with babies” type posts, it’s obvious that many people assume that biking is solely for recreation and not transportation.  Comments such as, “If you and your husband want to go for a bike ride, leave your baby with a sitter,”  reveal general ignorance about using a bicycle for transportation.

What if we want to go to an event in the park WITH the baby?  What if I need to pick something up at the grocery store?  Am I confined to only using my car for these short, easily bikeable trips for the first 12 months unless I leave baby behind?  Despite all the naysayers, I’m not giving up yet.

Safety
First, discard the false (yet commonly held) belief that cycling itself is inherently dangerous.  In fact, it’s no more dangerous than driving or riding in a car, yet most people hop in a car every day with little thought to the risk, and no one bats an eye at a pregnant woman driving a car or parents transporting their infant in a motor vehicle.

That leaves us with a couple of possible legitimate risks to consider when biking with babies: 1) balance and 2) road vibrations.

Balance
A child seat attached to the bicycle could destabilize the bike, especially if they raise the center of gravity.  However, most accidents here occur not while the bike in motion, but rather while it is stopped.  Solution: use care when loading/unloading and get a kickstand that provides more stability, either a double (i.e., pyramid) style or one that mounts closer to the rear of the bicycle.  You could also invest in one of the specialty cargo bikes that I mentioned in my last post, or use a trailer.

Road Vibrations
Although there are no studies on the subject, some people claim that riding in a bicycle trailer exposes young babies to levels of road vibration that can cause brain damage similar to shaken baby syndrome.  While I certainly don’t want to discount this risk, there is NO EVIDENCE that bicycling with babies in trailers causes brain damage.  Solution: Invest in a trailer with a suspension system, keep the trailer tires inflated at a lower pressure to absorb more impact, and secure infant in a car seat so that his/her head is fully supported.

Making it Happen
Since last writing on the subject, I have talked to two parents who love their Xtracycles for biking with slightly older children, but I am leaning toward a trailer + car seat as the best (and most economical) solution for biking with a young infant.

Unfortunately, the nice trailers that have suspension systems (examples here and here) cost significantly more than the run-of-the-mill bike trailer, and, because they’re less common, I imagine finding a used one will be next to impossible.

Realistically, I think the earliest we would try this would be around 3 months of age, meaning we have a bit more time to ponder.  Ideally, there would be a way that we could try various cargo bikes and bike plus trailer combinations before committing to one, but at some point, we’ll just have to make a decision.


We have zee sheet

If you walked through our backyard yesterday afternoon, you would have seen a pretty set of blue patterned sheets drying rapidly on the line.

To justify driving the car to a Le Leche League meeting yesterday morning, I tossed in a couple of bags of clothing and home goods that were waiting to be donated and swung by Goodwill after the meeting.  The stop provided the perfect opportunity to look for a spare set of old sheets and some old towels — supplies for our home birth.

Other than being a bit threadbare, the sheets are really quite lovely, and one of the four “old” towels I bought there is nicer than some of the towels in our current regular rotation.

Between those purchases (yay for thrift stores!), and the arrival of our “home birth kit,” we are almost set.  The home birth kit contains all of the disposable supplies for the birth.  I knew that when I ordered it but was still rather horrified when I opened the box and saw all of the [soon-to-be] trash.  However, it is a relatively small box, and Matthew reassured me that it will be massively less waste compared to an average hospital birth.

In other green baby prep news, I received a cloth diaper donation from a friend.  While we will most likely still need more in the way of diapers, I want to hold off somewhat and see how the whole Elimination Communication/Diaper-free Baby thing works before going out and buying a bunch of new or used cloth diapers.

While cloth diapering is certainly better than disposable, it is not without environmental costs itself, so I would like to have an idea of the number of diapers we will need to avoid excess, especially if we’re buying new.

Entropy in the Kitchen

As a child, I was slightly obsessive about having a perfectly neat and clean bedroom.  I somehow grew into an adult with much lower standards.  The normal state of our kitchen:

Not bad, but not great.  And it moves rather quickly from the in-between state pictured above to really bad.  Behold the horror:

I took these pictures last Friday morning, after a very frustrating time cooking dinner amidst this mess on Thursday night.

With dirty dishes covering the already limited counter space, we didn’t have much to work with.  A relatively simple meal prep turned stressful.

Fittingly, I forgot to snap a photo immediately after I cleaned last Friday, and by the time I thought to pull out the camera, things had devolved into the middle state depicted at the beginning of this post.

Cooking vs. Cleaning

The time from clean to messy is frustratingly short.  Here’s the thing: we like to cook and eat good food.  We’re often exhausted when we arrive home in the evening, but looking forward to a good meal usually provides motivation to cook.

However, by the time we cook the meal and eat, we’re ready for some down time — returning to the kitchen to clean up is the last thing on our list.  We USE our kitchen, and there are only so many hours in the day.

Green vs. Clean

Part of the problem is my own doing.  In an effort to reduce the amount of dishes we use, and therefore the amount of water and energy required to wash said dishes, I like to use dishes and utensils that are relatively clean a few times before washing them.  In this state between clean and dirty, there’s not much to do with the dishes other than leave them sitting out on the counter or table.

Between the cooking and the conservation attempts, the kitchen rarely looks like this . . .

. . . and the time it requires to go from clean to messy is distressingly short, but I am hoping that with a little more effort, we can maintain something a bit more sane, livable, and sanitary.